Let's talk about ... books, baby.

[NaokoSmith]

Not what you are reading, but just actual paper (card, calfskin, gold-tooled leather) books.

I have been able to start getting the boxes of my books out of the garage and shelving them. I'm still wondering how to organise them. How do you shelve your books? Alphabetically? By subject? My dream is to shelve my books chronologically! but many problems lie in the way of this ideal schemata.

Post pictures.

 

[Penuche]

They're mostly grouped by subject:
Food & drink in the kitchen (on shelves running round over the units and above the doorways);
Archaeology, Geography, history, sociology, and local(ish) politics in the hall;
Fiction, poetry, art, craft,and languages in the living room (some 2-3 deep on heavy duty cellar type storage shelves);
Occult, folklore, psychology, herbal medicine, and aromatherapy in the bedroom.

 

[oggbashan]

Even though I have downsized my library and have about 250 feet of shelving, double stacked, many of my books have to stay in boxes.

 

[sr71plt]

I have them stuff-shelved by genre. I look at the shelves occasionally and then go out and buy books to read that won't fit in the shelves. I guess I have shelves for looks and table tops for books to read.

 

[Gorza]

I love books.

You do get to that stage when you have so many books that you need to categorize them somehow. I know that I won't be able to find something if I didn't keep a record of where everything is. I have a home office, a work office and also books in my living room, so I need to have them where I need them. I also have students borrowing books, and try to keep record of that.

Last year, a student apologized for not having returned a book on anarchism in the classical world. I thought that, given the subject matter, dutifully returning it would be against the book's principles. I suggested she liberate it.

It's sad, but I have a digital catalogue of all my books (it's especially nice to keep notes of the quirky bookshops in which I found some of them). A long time ago, I developed a cataloguing system, like giving all my books a library shelfmark (I even have a suffix for oversize books!).

The ************ website is quite a good, basic tool for cataloguing books. You can enter ISBNs and it fills in the details. There's even a social side, where you connect to the one other person who has the same obscure tome.

One colleague has her office bookcase arranged by colour of spine (ROYGBIV), saying that she can picture the colour in her mind long before remembering the title or author. I suppose it depends on how your mind works. I do think of colour when I'm reaching for a book, but my collection is so eclectic (my messed-up mind!) that I need it to be arranged topically.

 

[Penuche]

I do think of colour when I'm reaching for a book, but my collection is so eclectic (my messed-up mind!) that I need it to be arranged topically.

One of mine, "the Modern Antiquarian" has a very distinctive cover, and it's been enough to persuade a few kindred spirits out to themselves.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

i don't own a bookshelf!

 

[Penuche]

i don't own a bookshelf!

You don't have to - have you at least got books?

 

[geronimo_appleby]

You don't have to - have you at least got books?

no, i've been transient for nearly four years. but if a kindle counts...

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I put 150 favorite books on Kindle, and kept 100 others with no Kindle edition. All the rest of my library I gave to my son.

 

[sheablue]

If I knew how to upload photos, I would take one of my bookshelf. Maybe I'll send one to Naoko and she can post it for me.

I have no rhyme or reason to my bookshelf. It's mostly fiction, with some philosophy titles thrown in that my Father in Law published. My husband took the photos for the book covers, so that shelf is mainly for him, to feel like he has books, too.

I keep the ones I still need to read in one section, but that is overflowing now. There is a shelf or two of signed editions. There are some that I've read a million times but need keep with me because they are important. Not important books, mind you, just important to me. I might need to lend them to someone, help enlighten them.

I wish I had more room in my house for more bookshelves, because I do have several boxes of books that didn't "make the cut" but I would still like to have on a shelf somewhere.

There's not much scholarly on my shelf, but to me, books are everything. I can't imagine not having a bookshelf, or books, in my home. I've succumbed to the eReader, and I love that, too, for several reasons, mainly that I don't have any room on my shelves for any more books.

I grew up in a house full of books. My parents, and both of my grandmothers are/were avid readers. My dad now has to smuggle books into the house and hide them in the closet of my old bedroom because my mom has insisted there is no more room for books, and he hasn't read much of what he already has. As we all know, that just isn't the point.

One of my grandmother's kept a little notebook of all the books she read, and what she thought of them. Little notes in her little cursive handwriting. A visit to her meant you would leave with a grocery bag full of books from her shelves, after she had consulted her notebook and thought about what you might like.

Does it run in families, do you think? A love of reading and a need for books? My father in law runs his own small publishing company. Mostly works of philosophy and theology. But he almost never reads for pleasure, or if he does, it's of a scholarly nature only. So my husband grew up surrounded by books, but never developed a habit or desire to read for pleasure. He does it now, a little, but mostly for my benefit, because he knows I feel that anyone who doesn't read for pleasure is maybe a little bit off.

 

[MagicaPractica]

I'm organized by century in a few bookcases then by genre in the newer stuff. (My house has been been in my family for quite some time.)

 

[Penuche]

no, i've been transient for nearly four years. but if a kindle counts...

It counts except for one thing...

It used to be common practice (at least among Pagans, Wiccans, practitioners of ceremonial magic and similar) that in order to do the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each other, we'd check the contents of each other's occult library - the more obscure an item, or the more serious the author, or the more nerve it'd took to order that particular volume, the more that person might gain respect from having that book.

If your entire collection could easily be downloaded, didn't have to be asked for, took next to no searching for, and certainly didn't need to be covered or hidden from less tolerant housemates etc, it's not quite the same experience...

 

[oggbashan]

We have downsized houses after the children became independent. In our old house we had several libraries.

In the largest room (the 'playroom') we had all the children's books and the music books above the piano. The children's library occupied about 300 feet of shelving. The music books - bound scores and books about music - had about twenty feet of shelving.

In the front living room were the classics in English, the language books including books about teaching languages and classics in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Latin. The reference collection was there too - atlases, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc. Total about 200 feet of shelf length.

The back living room, when not occupied by an Art student, was for Art, Architecture and Travel - 100 feet.

The breakfast room was for Cookery, Gardening and popular culture including annuals, humour and comics e.g Giles Cartoons, Asterix, Tintin etc.

The kitchen had a small shelf of cookery books in current use.

The hall had a collection of National Geographic magazines from the 1920s, and the Geographical Magazine (UK equivalent) from the 1930s.

The front of the upstairs landing was for romance and chick-lit on one side, and Science Fiction on the other - 50 feet total.

The two front bedrooms had my wife's personal library in one, and my personal library in the other.

The other three bedrooms had each daughter's personal library.

The toilet, which was a long narrow room, you opened the door, shut it behind you and walked to the toilet, had detective fiction and westerns.

There were piles and boxes of books in each room that wouldn't fit on the shelves.

No wonder I opened a secondhand book shop!

 

[legerdemer]

The first thing I did when we moved into our most recent house is design floor to ceiling bookshelves everywhere I could to expand bookshelf space. We started by organizing roughly by topic (fiction (e.g., sci fi, mysteries, comics and graphic novels, and the trash shelf; some language separation as well), history, military, science, philosophy, etc. Then it all went to hell, books are piled two deep, vertically and horizontally. Still, I tend to know where to look for and find most things. There are some book boxes, too. Books in prison, is how I feel about that...

I try to rein in my book-buying to force myself to read all the books I've bought but haven't read, but it's nearly impossible. Having hardly any bookstores in my town, even used ones, helps control that. One of my favorite past times, book browsing - gone... I loved spending time in England last year - they still have bookstores!!! Whenever I visit places with good bookstores, they are a destination.

Both my partner and I are avid readers, and now our kid is - we didn't do anything special other than make books available, and she saw us absorbed in them. So yes, it runs in families, but I think it's largely cultural... My parents were reading addicts as well. Late in life, my mother lost her eyesight and it was a real tragedy.

The first thing I do (after saying "hello") when I visit a new friend's place is to look at their books. It tells me lots about them.

I use the Kindle and iBooks apps on an iPad as an extension of bookshelves, and love it for traveling and for falling asleep.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

So far I have been able to find all the books I want online, except in one case where I was able to purchase said books cheap. It actually cost more to ship them than buy them.

Everything is organized on my hard-drive and out on my website(s). With unlimited storage, I use my website as my cloud storage. I can sort my books any which way I like. I can read them on any device I like. The few hard-copies I have are in a stack on my nightstand.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Random access.

The problem with my current house is floor to ceiling glass windows and external doors in every room, which means few spare walls for bookshelves. The "solution" is one big bookshelf in the lounge which is double stacked with fiction, mostly, where I try at least to keep single author collections together, but relies on "so that's where that title went," or "bugger, I've bought that before, already," or "hmmm, forgot I had that one." Then there are two shorter bookcases of my daughter's fashion collection (Alexander McQueen is one of her favourite designers, which suits my visual taste superbly) and a bunch of art books.

Downstairs there is a huge built in bookshelf with glass doors, one half is my LP collection (close on a thousand, getting close to the same number of CDs - I'm a luddite when it comes to music and don't own an ipod - analogue or uncompressed digital just sounds so much better), the other half is my photography portfolio collection. Pride of place is every issue of Black and White (a stunning Oz publication that ran to 80 or so issues over about a decade).

Then, under the stairs is the Aladdin's cave - my dad's books and my history collection, old novels, sci-fi, blah blah blah - my classics. All complete random access. My daughter loves reading, thank god, and dug out One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the other day, and then Catch 22. Most of her generation haven't heard of either, which is tragic. I couldn't imagine a life without proper books, that's just not right.

 

[GoldenCojones]

I can't even begin to guess how many books I have. My wife and I have been downsizing for about a year now, giving boxes of books to local libraries. We are preparing to retire to a sailboat in a few years. Trying to decide which fifty or so books we can keep is proving to be very hard. So when we get a box of books that both of us agree can go, we take it away. We have emptied one bookshelf

 

[NaokoSmith]

Wow, you guys have been busy in here!

C'mon, Kindles do not count! although given that everyone just steers threads off topic, please post pictures - of the Kindle, Geronimo! if we get to see any more of your butt, it will inspire a whole new genre of erotic fiction

SamScribble was saying recently how the fact that people can tuck their reading away tidily on a Kindle instead of out on the coffee table for all their friends to see what they enjoy, means many more people indulge their taste for erotica more freely. I remember myself when I was doing reserch on lgb Muslim people, and reading all the very few books about queer sexuality in Islam (oh yes, there are some!), having to be careful about doing so on the tube train travelling in East London. And once I was on a train, reading a hilarious lesbian novel - one of the Mabel Maney Nancy Clue series. I was laughing so hard I forgot to hide the title. The guy opposite me got off before me, and as he did, he carefully showed me his copy of Gay Times

 

[Gorza]

I have no Kindle or whatnot. I did think about getting one, but, when I found out that academic papers in PDF format don't resize to fit the screen, I had no use for one. I spend enough time sitting at computer screens without making this the medium for all reading. Yes, I am a Luddite.

Hidden books have much history. It's interesting to think that Kindles are a means of increasing readership of books that people might not want to be seen buying or reading. There is a history of binding different covers onto 'dodgy' books. Of course, the Bible was a particularly cheeky favourite for substitute cover. Then there's the old solander, which is not so much for reading, but built to blend into one's book collection. They now, in prosaic fashion, name it a 'book safe'. When bigger things need hiding, there's that book that operates the lever that opens the bookcase to reveal one's bondage lair.

The greatest number of discoveries of ancient manuscripts happen in libraries on the realisation that the item has been incorrectly catalogued. Often the quires of a forbidden book (some tasty heresy perhaps) are sewn between quires of something more acceptable (Bible again). I am partial to a spot of the old codicology, you know.

 

[sr71plt]

I have no Kindle/Nook. I do believe that e-readers opened up the erotica market.

 

[Handley_Page]

Filed by title/ size.
It looks neat enough (until the publishers bring our a new edition completely. . . .)

 

[Tio_Narratore]

There's 220 feet of shared bookshelf at home. I had 160 feet at school, now, with a move to a brand-new office, I've been reduced to 21 feet. And boxes. Boxes in front of bookshelves. Boxes on top of bookshelves. Boxes on the floor. Boxes outside my office. Boxes in our lab prep room. Boxes at home...

 

[NaokoSmith]

I had 160 feet at school, now, with a move to a brand-new office, I've been reduced to 21 feet.

Be grateful, Tio. The famous British qualitative ethnographer Martyn Hammersley was relocated along with his other colleagues to an open office . He took pictures of the shelves of books in his old office, printed them off and stuck them on the dividers round his desk

 

[geronimo_appleby]

I have no Kindle or whatnot. I did think about getting one, but, when I found out that academic papers in PDF format don't resize to fit the screen, I had no use for one. I spend enough time sitting at computer screens without making this the medium for all reading. Yes, I am a Luddite.

Hidden books have much history. It's interesting to think that Kindles are a means of increasing readership of books that people might not want to be seen buying or reading. There is a history of binding different covers onto 'dodgy' books. Of course, the Bible was a particularly cheeky favourite for substitute cover. Then there's the old solander, which is not so much for reading, but built to blend into one's book collection. They now, in prosaic fashion, name it a 'book safe'. When bigger things need hiding, there's that book that operates the lever that opens the bookcase to reveal one's bondage lair.

The greatest number of discoveries of ancient manuscripts happen in libraries on the realisation that the item has been incorrectly catalogued. Often the quires of a forbidden book (some tasty heresy perhaps) are sewn between quires of something more acceptable (Bible again). I am partial to a spot of the old codicology, you know.

i resisted kindle for a time, but when i started travelling, i succumbed to the convenience. also, in a lot of the places i've been, the 'library' of musty, tatty paperbacks has been quite spare. finding a jo nesbo in the norwegian is a bit of a pisser, too. since i can't read norwegian.